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What is the MSR challenge?

The International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
(MSR) is celebrated every year co-located with the International
Conference on Software Engineering. MSR started as yet-another
workshop, but soon it began to attract attention, I believe partly
because of the very interesting MSR Challenge.

Software engineering conferences are full of empirical studies about
different software projects, but often these studies are not useful
for practitioners, and their predictions cannot be tested against the
real world due to the publication cycles in this
conferences. Moreover, libre (free / open source) software projects
are sometimes annoyed when mined in search of data because the
conclusion of the empirical studies are not perceived as useful for
them.

MSR challenge is the solution to all these drawbacks. Each year,
MSR chooses a couple of targets for the challenge, usually libre
software projects, and sometimes this is done in collaboration with
the libre software projects themselves. Another possibility is to
submit a prediction for the evolution of a libre software project. The
prediction must be done for the months elapsed between the submission
and the conference dates. In the conference, the best predictions are
announced, with a lot of emotion and intrigue. The winners of the best
challenge report are decided between the attendees after the
presentations, and the winners usually receive a gift.

This is a great opportunity to show what you are capable of, and to
help libre software projects with insightful reports, so receiving
something back in exchange of the invaluable data and software
repositories that they provide.

This year, the deadline for challenge papers is Feb 16th 2011. If you
submit something to the challenge, you may consider submitting also a
paper for the conference (after all, you have to go there, so take the
opportunity and submit also a paper :-). For regular papers, the
deadline is Jan 26th 2011. You can find more details in the
Important dates page and in the Call for papers.